Friday, August 8:
R. was up twice during the night, but he does not complain. “I am now already ten years older than Beethoven was.” I observe that B. was left alone to die; he says that perhaps he was untamable, like my father, but people had nevertheless taken care of my father - though certainly not the Germans. R.: “Heaven preserve me from German women!” He laughs and says that when one talks of deep inside, things look so horrible in the human body, but he uses this as a starting point to enlarge upon ideality and the thing-in-itself.
At lunchtime he plucks for me the rose whose scent and color have entranced him. But he says vivisection is worrying him; he has not yet made up his mind how to take part in the movement. He reads some more things in Daudet which I did not recommend but which nevertheless interested him (such as Le Concert de la huitième), then says he has now had enough, adding that he started on the Bible today and cannot get over his astonishment that in England and elsewhere this story of the Creation is still the basis of religious instruction; all the same, the sense of sin through knowledge is a fine one.
He asks me whether I have been reading my or his copy of Faust, and the mere mention of our German book leads us to savor its splendid images. The greatest thing in it, R. thinks, is the “Classical Walpurgis Night,” all of it dramatic, conceived for the stage, but without recalling what stages were like in a country with no popular art such as that possessed by the Greeks, who created a popular art for educated people.
We have our coffee in the summerhouse; vexation with the Fliegende Blätter, which pokes fun at the animal-protection society; in the Illustrirte a portrait of Prince Napoleon; R. says he resembles the conductor Abt and N. I. Walk with R.: kept an eye on Fidi at his swimming class; on our return he espies us in the distance and calls, “Cockadoodledo”!
In the evening friends Wolz. and Rub., R. somewhat silent, his mind occupied with his problem.
[Added at the foot of this and the following two pages: “Postscript to the previous days. Yesterday: I found R. in the salon, looking up the word Friede [‘peace’] in Grimm’s dictionary and feeling pleased that the meaning bore out his motto for our house: Schutz [protection], Tutela, Einfriedigung [enclosure]! He called the present way of the world a ‘mummery.’ When we had Frau Dr. Herz here yesterday for Loldi and she talked of how it cripples and suffocates the healthy ones. When he recently read his article to me, he said, ‘Love, its complete unfolding and its power - that has never before been expressed in music as it is in Brünnhilde and Isolde.’ I mention Elisabeth, whereupon he: ‘Yes, but she is only a bud, and killed off in bud.’ Thoughts of having the Idyll pulped after paying back the costs of it - after all, it was yielded up only in order to release Parsifal! His reading of Daudet leads R. to look at Doré’s Don Quixote illustrations, which fill him with disgust: ‘The French don’t understand that kind of humor.’ ”]